Chris Selley: Ontario's Liberals won't stop making gas-plant excuses

Ontario's Liberals won't stop making gas-plant excuses

The strange, complicated dance of accountability over Ontario’s cancelled gas-fired power plants continues at Queen’s Park. It has almost gotten to the point where blame is being doled out in inverse proportion to the extent to which people deserve it.

For weeks, newly minted Premier Kathleen Wynne had expressed “regret” over the decision to kill the plants, or at least the cost of doing so — current estimates are in the $600-million range — in order to save some Liberal ridings. But she conspicuously did not apologize.

Then, last week, ex-premier Dalton McGuinty slithered into a witness chair and accepted responsibility for the mess in his inimitable fashion. It cost too much money, he conceded. But he didn’t regret cancelling the plants. He merely regretted not realizing sooner that the presence of such plants would condemn Oakville and Mississauga’s children to life in what he described as a sort of Dickensian hellscape — “going to their neighbourhood school in the shadow of a smokestack.”

This seemed to be the Liberal line, then: Ms. Wynne was out of the loop; it was all Mr. McGuinty’s fault; he’s gone now; now let’s all hold hands and stride confidently into our uncertain future.

On Tuesday, that changed. Appearing on TVOntario’s The Agenda, Ms. Wynne finally apologized. “I am very sorry that this happened the way it did,” she said. “And I take responsibility as having been part of that government.”

Fair enough. Except that meanwhile, her minions were busy trying to deflect blame on to people who had absolutely nothing to do with cancelling the gas plants. At committee and during Question Period, the Liberals attacked Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak for having also promised to cancel the Mississauga plant during the 2011 election campaign.

Mr. Hudak was having none of it. “The insinuation that anyone other than the Liberal party is responsible for this fiasco is an insult to the intelligence of every Ontarian,” he said at committee.

It’s a legitimate question to put to Mr. Hudak: ‘If you had won that election, would you have cancelled the plant?’ But it’s not a question that holds any advantage for the Liberals

Government House Leader John Milloy came back at him in Question Period: “Let me get this straight,” he intoned. “When the Liberal Party, in the last election, promised to cancel the [Mississauga] gas plant, it was the worst thing that has ever befallen this society since the Macarena or the plague, and when the Progressive Conservative Party makes the exact same promise, we don’t want to talk about it. Why the double standard?”

I called this “kindergarten logic” in a recent column, after infrastructure minister Glen Murray had tweeted about Mr. Hudak’s position. But I assumed that was one Mr. Murray’s freelance projects, not part of the official Liberal recovery plan.

“Why the double standard”? For serious? The two sides of the coin are: (a) an opposition party that promised to cancel an unpopular project; and (b) a government that signed off on that project in the first place over widespread protests and now admits it shouldn’t have; that had or should have had the ability to determine how much the cancellation would cost, but didn’t or couldn’t exercise that ability, or did and thought the price acceptable; and then actually cancelled the project, which only it was in a position to do.

That’s not a double-standard. It’s the difference between Billy daring Danny to jump off the jungle gym, and Danny jumping off the jungle gym. Danny is now trying to blame Billy for his broken leg.

There is something of Mr. McGuinty in Ms. Wynne, I think. To me, she comes off as the sort of fairly reasonable, pragmatic person that many Ontarians (not me, goodness knows) seemed to see in her predecessor. Mr. McGuinty had an amazing ability to screw something up, flip-flop, then sell it back to Ontarians as evidence of his superior listening skills. He’s done that with the gas plant screw-up; now all that’s left to learn is how much it costs us.

It’s certainly a legitimate question to put to Mr. Hudak: If you had won that election, knowing what you know now, would you have cancelled the plant? I’ll ask him next time I see him. But it’s not a question that holds any advantage for the Liberals. The ex-premier having accepted responsibility and buggered off, and the current one having apologized, perhaps they can now stop insulting Ontarians’ intelligence, take their lumps, and move on.